Jon Simpson’s Weblog

Did I mention I really like maintaining Wordpress installations with subversion already?

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.0.1

One command to perform a no-pain, no-hassle update to Wordpress 2.0.1. Great!

Amongst other things, the s-video port got lost from the new MacBook. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the replacement is an adapter to go from DVI to s-video. If you happen to have a Powerbook around, you may wish to plug in both the s-video and DVI out simultaneously and observe the results. I managed to thoroughly confuse my graphics chipset as to what it was meant to be driving at what resolution whilst having both plugged in (disappointing, as I’d expected a 3rd desktop to appear in Display Preferences).

The adapter seems to ’solve’ this problem by making the DVI out and s-video mutually exclusive, at the expense of convenient access to the port. It’s at least a possible explanation for the lack of s-video, although I’d have preferred to see proper support for all outputs at once enabled on graphics chipsets..

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Ok, so tonight’s CSCS was focused around the unix userland & tools, and how to administrate a Linux/Unix box. Lack of networking hampered things slightly, but there was definitely some useful stuff demonstrated (and its the kind of thing that’s really useful when it’s exactly what you’re looking for). I’m posting a rough crib sheet from what was discussed, anything anyone wants to add in the comments would be great. So here, in no particular order..
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So it seems Microsoft have discontinued Windows Media Player for mac to reduce the size of their mac business unit, and are going to focus more on going forward with business applications. (source). So what replaces it?
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So today had lots of interesting announcements on the Apple front at Macworld SF and a few other cool tidbits. Mac OS X 10.4.4, a Google Earth beta for Mac OS X and the new hardware announcements. Interesting to see the new MacBook Pro announced. It’s not perhaps as big a leap in terms of design as I’d been hoping, but I guess the changes under the hood more than make up for it. I’m certainly surprised it doesn’t seem like a compelling upgrade from the current G4 PowerBook (although that remains to be seen, given the numerous unknowns, including possible Windows compatibility..).
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For my own personal, later reference.

Check input, stop if f(a) * f(b) > 0

while (result not accurate enough)
	c = (a + b) / 2
	if (f(a) * f(c) > 0)
		a = c
	else
		b = c
	end if
end while

With an error band of |a - b| / 2

Having had multiple copies of Wordpress installed on my server since the 1.2 version, I’d grown increasingly sick of the upgrade process (mostly involving removing every single non-customized file, replacing it with its new equivalent, then trying to merge the changes gracefully).

For a weblog or two, that procedure might be acceptable, but when the numbers top 10 it takes an unacceptably long amount of time to upgrade on each release. Getting lazy and skipping patches didn’t seem like a good idea, and 1.5 did little to ease the pain (except moving the themes and plugins out of the main codebase). Read the rest of this entry »

This is a simple/step-by-step guide to building mplayer’s CVS on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. There seem to be quite a few issues going around about this (and I have experienced quite a few of them first hand..)
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Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9) has been the root of many issues for Mac users in dealing with media playback for a long while now. Due to its prevalence on people’s desktop computers, a lot of small video clips that float around the web often carry the .wmv extension, and the playback of these files is something that should ‘just work’. You’d think it would, especially given that Microsoft produce a copy of Windows Media Player for Mac OS X that ’supports’ this format. But that isn’t the whole story…
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